Kurt Haijby
Swedish restaurateur at the centre of the 1952 Haijby affair — a politically explosive Stockholm District Court prosecution for extortion involving allegations of a relationship with the late King Gustaf V. The case became the canonical Swedish royal-secrets episode of the 20th century.
Kurt Haijby was a Stockholm restaurateur whose 1952 prosecution for extortion produced one of the most politically explosive court cases of the early post-war period in Sweden. The proceedings, which dominated the Swedish press through that year, addressed Haijby’s allegations of a long-running relationship with the late King Gustaf V (1858-1950) and the state’s counter-prosecution for blackmail. He was convicted in 1953.
The factual core of the case has never been settled. The Stockholm District Court adjudicated extortion only; whether the underlying claim of a relationship was true is not a closed historical question. Haijby had earlier — in 1936-1938 — been institutionalised under disputed psychiatric grounds, an episode that 1990s public discussion treated as politically motivated. The state’s, the police’s and the press’s handling of the affair has been a recurring subject of scholarship and journalism.
Alongside the Geijer affair of 1977 and the Ebbe Carlsson affair of 1988, the Haijby affair — see Haijby Affair 1952 — anchors a Swedish genre of state-establishment scandals in which the boundary between policing, press freedom and political protection of senior figures becomes the public question. Haijby died in 1965; the case was reopened in books, articles and parliamentary motions for decades afterwards.